'Racist Lady' Demands Asian American Woman Bow to Her in Viral Tiktok Video

A TikTok video that captured a woman's racist abuse towards an Asian American woman at a gas station has gone viral.

Jenny Park, 30, posted the minute-long clip on the video-sharing platform on Wednesday—a day after the shooting of eight people, including six Asian women, in shootings at three Atlanta area spas. The attacks were widely viewed as the latest incident of racially motivated attacks against Asians during the coronavirus pandemic.

Park told Newsweek that her 30-year-old friend, who asked to remain anonymous, had filmed a stranger's verbal abuse towards her while she filled up her vehicle at the Shell gas station at 2211 W Malvern Avenue in the Fullerton, California last week.

"Bow to me or you will go back to f***ing where you came from," a woman is heard, but not seen, telling her friend.

Park said she had been meaning to share the video on social media since her friend sent it to her over the weekend and that it "blew up" when she shared it on TikTok Wednesday. The clip has been viewed more than 1.6 million times since and liked almost 500,000 times.

Park explained that her friend had been called an "Asian b****" by the woman while getting cash out of an ATM at the Amerige Heights Town Center shortly before the incident captured in the TikTok clip.

"She sort of just ignored it," Park said, "but then the woman widely swung at her. She didn't know what to do, so she was just trying to hurry up and get her money."

Park said her friend headed to her car and called her boyfriend. Then she headed to the gas station, where the same woman approached her and started hurling racist abuse. That's when her friend started covertly filming the woman's tirade, Park said.

"She was so shocked... she needed to have something just in case the lady did hurt her," Park said. But she added that her friend "didn't want to fuel her anger by recording her face.

"Go back where you came from! You get nothing!" The woman is heard yelling. "I own all the gas stations and you get nothing... Asians. Nothing. Go back to whichever... did I stutter?"

At one point, she declares: "We're the crazy rich Mexicans now."

Just before the clip ends, she adds: "You're just Asian. You're Asian, go back to your Asia!"

Park said her friend said the woman looked Caucasian and in her 50s, but was left confused by the Mexican comment. She said her friend didn't report the incident to police, but she is considering visiting the gas station to see if any surveillance footage captured the encounter.

The attack against her friend, as well as a rise in anti-Asian hate incidents, have scared her, Park added.

"The Fullerton area is really highly populated with Asian people, so it was it was like a huge shock for us," she said. "I was a little worried because my parents are here like… do I want them to be out and getting gas or like just going to get groceries?"

Alongside her clip, Park used the hashtag #StopAsianHate, which has been used by many Asian Americans and others in the wake of the Atlanta area shootings.

On Tuesday, Stop AAPI Hate, an organization formed to address anti-Asian hate amid the pandemic, released a report saying it had been alerted about almost 3,800 anti-Asian hate incidents between March 18, 2020 and February 28 this year.

The report said verbal harassment made up more than two-thirds of the reported incidents, and that women reported incidents 2.3 times more than men.

It also cautioned that the figures represent just a fraction of the hate incidents that actually occur.

In the wake of the shootings, Asian American organizations have said that the rhetoric of former president Donald Trump emboldened such attacks.

"The Trump administration's relentless scapegoating of Asians for the pandemic has only exacerbated the impact on Asian business owners and frontline workers and inflamed existing racism," the Atlanta chapter of Asian Americans Advancing Justice said in a statement.

"The hypersexualization of Asian American women and the broad normalization of violence against women of color, immigrant women, and poor women make Asian American women particularly vulnerable."